


I'll Be the Fire Escape

by beanarie



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Avengers Movies Universe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-03
Updated: 2012-12-03
Packaged: 2017-11-20 05:03:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/581582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beanarie/pseuds/beanarie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A plotless confederation of unconnected ficlets depicting Tony and Pepper's life together. Largely fluffy, occasionally angsty, always at least a little bit snappy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'll Be the Fire Escape

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from The Postal Service. Also each part of this was inspired by ericandy's 30 Day OTP Challenge on Tumblr. Also also. Warning for death of an OC family member.

"Pep. No, here. Come on," Tony says, and leads her by the wrist. He does that, has been doing that since roughly eight and a half years ago. It's one of those behavioral tics that goes along with being a globally recognized genius whose sense of empathy is still somewhat under development. When he needs her to be somewhere she isn't, he moves her physically because sometimes using his words would take longer. She's used to that. 

Today she adjusts her grip and takes him by the hand. Four paces later he pauses mid-step. "What's this about?" he says, looking down. "What are you up to right here?"

"Just avoiding a case of Nursemaid's Elbow," she replies. 

"That... You absolutely just made that up."

"Oh, so you're calling me a liar now." She lifts her chin. "Go ahead. Ask JARVIS."

"You are only saying that because you know he hasn't been reinstalled on this floor. We're lucky we got lights up here."

"You had something to show me," she prods. 

"Oh," he says. "Mm. Yes." He lifts her hand to his mouth and plants a kiss there, sort of absentmindedly, without any further intent. The hairs in his mustache tickle her knuckles, but she doesn't laugh for fear of breaking the spell. "I found the perfect spot to show off the Barnett Newman."

"I'm intrigued," she says. "Lead on." And he does.

*

He caught them during dinner. No preamble, he just strolled up to their table and started shooting. 

But that was in the increasingly distant past. Now she's safe, home, or on her way there. Tony has already shed his armor. They're only twelve flights away. 

Idly she takes note that her cream suit has become mottled with splashes of imported Earl Grey. He's being so quiet. Though not in one of those this-is-leading-to-something-worrying ways. At least she hopes not. She isn't in the best place to judge that at the moment.

"You can scream some more, if you want? It's just the two of us now."

"I'm fine," she says, gravel in her voice. She's done enough of that. Her eyes mist over as she takes in an unsteady breath and holds it. Then the elevator reaches the penthouse and she's able to blink it away. 

He guides her to the couch with a hand to the small of her back. She sits, primly, refusing to sink down. Her throat burns. She has no idea where her Kate Spade bag is. His thumb rubs circles on the inside of her wrist.

One muscle fiber at a time, she lets her shoulders fall. At this sign of acquiescence, he invades her space completely, nuzzling the side of her neck, kissing her collarbone, running his hands along her back. She shoves her fingers into his hair, stiff from dried sweat, smiling as her mind replays a short clip from today, those ten seconds when he lifted the shooter up so high they almost disappeared from view. 

She has the greatest boyfriend in the world.

"Who's luckier than me?" she whispers. 

* 

Hands down, this is the most boring movie she has ever watched. 

It's possible a combination of exhaustion and twenty-year lack of interest in Adam Sandler is responsible for her decreased focus. However, she doesn't intend on testing that theory by trying to watch the film when she isn't underslept.

Tony's thigh makes a surprisingly comfortable pillow.

"What did you want to be," he asks, his hand spreading warmth through her bare shoulder. "Back when you were, you know, a little chilito." Tony's attempts to draw Dr. Banner out of his shell have been more successful than anyone could have guessed. Lately that has involved a lot of talk of Latin America.

"Golda Meir," she mumbles. 

"You wanted to rule an entire people. Can you hear the shock in my voice?" Her lips curl almost of their own volition while he laughs. "This must be pretty disappointing for you."

She turns onto her stomach and hugs his knees. "I've made my peace with it."

* 

As she shakes water droplets from her hands into the sink and reaches for a paper towel, Pepper stares at Natasha's reflection in the mirror. "You really are extraordinarily beautiful."

Natasha responds with a tiny uptick in the left corner of her mouth. It's all she can manage while reapplying her lipstick. 

Pepper wonders what it must be like for a secret agent with her face and curves, what she's been ordered to do in the context of saving the world. She thinks about how she perfected her own smile in high school. She learned just how much teeth to show, how long to hold it for, how loud to laugh at their jokes. What length her skirt should be. All of this in order to be noticed but not dismissed. She figured out how to make an impression without forfeiting respect. It's very likely that Natasha has had to go much, much further than that.

"I will choose to take that as a compliment," Natasha says, pressing her lips together and blotting her full mouth with a bit of white tissue. "So thank you."

Pepper laughs. Natasha winks at her.

"We should do this again one night," Pepper says. "Just the two of us." She pushes open the restroom door and they re-emerge into the dining room. Tony is playing at one of the waitstaff stations, tapping away at a computer and muttering to himself and holding off two anxious-looking servers with a raised palm.

"There's a wine bar in the Flatiron District I've been wanting to try," Natasha offers, right before she moves to re-join Steve Rogers and Agent Barton at the table. The two men are deep in conversation. Smart money says either weapons or baseball.

Pepper grins after her. "It's a date."

* 

She breaks a full forty-five minutes of silence with, "You know you don't have to do this."

"It's always great, these little reminders I'm not being puppet-mastered," Tony says with a slight smile. "I kind of knew that already, though."

"I mean just, really..." She cuts herself off, takes a few seconds to regroup. Because she can feel herself getting swept away and nothing would give that away quicker than her voice. "You can go home. You should."

"You want me to?" His face is unreadable.

They've reached the room. Pepper comes to a stop just before the open doorway. She runs her index finger along the tiny jut of the doorjamb. 

"Pep?"

She turns to kiss him, quickly and insistently, her hand cupping the back of his head. "Stay here?" she says. For a brief, startling second she doesn't think she'll be able to pull it together, but she manages to get her hands to stop shaking.

"Okay," he says.

With a short, decisive (grateful) nod, she enters the room, alone. She sits in the only chair, scooting it closer to the bed. The respirator and the monitors are so much louder than they seem on TV, she can hardly hear herself think. But it'll be quiet soon, just a moment or two after they hand over the papers and she signs them. She reaches over the bedrail and takes one small, dry hand in hers, mindful of the needle taped to the back. 

"Hi, Mom," she says. And then she comes apart, quietly.

* 

The eighth time they have sex, she holds him off for the time it takes him to let out a truly heartfelt groan in order to tie her hair back with an elastic. He eyes her, not judging, just recognizing that she's doing something new and not quite understanding why. Maybe one day he'll figure out on his own how unpleasant it is to feel perspiration plastering hair to the back of his neck. (But hopefully not. She likes his hair short.) From then on, she always starts things off by putting her hair up.

One day she happens to enter the kitchen after two hours on the elliptical. She's stolen a Motorhead t-shirt and a pair of boxer-briefs from his drawer because all her gym clothes are in the wash, and she hasn't looked in a mirror since she brushed her teeth this morning. He's on her almost immediately, like a Pomeranian that needs to be fixed badly.

" _Really_?" she laughs, tugging at her messy ponytail. "I don't think this is what Pavlov had in mind." 

He bites her shoulder in response.

* 

She looks up as he enters the penthouse. "You know," she says. "I don't find you nearly as funny as I did in the beginning."

"Bullshit alert," he says, with a smile that stops before his eyes. He doesn't sit down. "We both know you never found me funny. Cute, yes. A Tasmanian devil in the sack-"

That's all she needed, for sex to come into it. She pushes her computer closed, wishing she were the type to just smash things against the wall. It must be incredibly satisfying. "You don't have even the tiniest, infinitesimally small iota of respect for what I do, do you?" She shakes her head. "Don't answer that. Please, if I have to hear you _lie_ on top of everything else, I swear to God..."

"Yeah, you got me. I think of you as a skirt on top of ridiculously high heels. That's why I gave you my goddamn company."

"You can't dine on that forever, Tony! You gave me the company because, of the three people in the world you trust, I'm the one with a Master's in Business Admin and _you_ were- You know what, you want to have that conversation now? Honestly? We don't have enough to talk about?"

"If you think I'll have anything to say other than the investors can kiss my ass, I'm going to have you checked for some kind of memory disorder. Clearly you've forgotten everything you ever knew about me."

"Of course that's your response. You're Tony Stark. Money flies out of your fingertips, so it's endless and infinite and you don't have to cooperate with anyone or compromise, ever."

"Pepper, you get that if I rolled over every time some one percenter got their panties in a twist, we'd both be in very different places right now."

It's the smugness in his tone that does it, shatters her thin resolve like ice at the beginning of Spring. " _I'm not St_ -" She stops before things take a turn for the truly cruel. No, she isn't Obadiah Stane, in so many ways. Most importantly, she won't let him go on for twenty years with no accountability to the rest of the company. "I need you to work with me. You make my job harder than it has to be by being so you, all the time. You're a _grown man_. You can't take a few minutes out of your day to do the mature thing?"

But the damage is done. Tony turns, so swiftly she can almost hear the air moving around him. The last thing she hears as he walks out is him asking JARVIS to boot up the Mark IX.

* 

He doesn't make it to bed the night he turns forty-five. She finds him early the next morning, lying on the couch in the living room. His eyes are closed, but the set of his shoulders makes her think he isn't sleeping.

There's a bright red patch of skin on his arm about three inches long. She runs her finger alongside the burn, murmuring, "What did you do to yourself?"

"Hush," he whispers.

"Does it hurt?"

"Believe I said 'hush', Potts."

She climbs in behind him, taking up the gap between Tony and the upholstery. He yawns, covering her arm with his own and pulling her close. They stay that way until JARVIS breaks the comfortable silence.

"Sir, your caterer is on the line," he says. "I also have a message from Colonel Rhodes, and tabloid photographers have begun congregating at the front gates."

Tony doesn't react at all.

She presses a kiss behind his ear. "Did you fall asleep?" 

"Just chill for a while," he says. "We could do that, right?"

She should remind him that she has to pick up their last bundle from the cleaners, and there is a videoconference with London she was really hoping to do before the festivities got started. She's put Tamsin off twice already for varying reasons. 

"It's your day," she says, wrapping her leg around his. "We can do whatever you want."


End file.
